3 Simple Ways To Promote Productivity And Proactiveness

Many customer success organizations still work in a high touch approach. If asked, they will admit that their job is to do anything for the client. This approach is not scalable, time-consuming and what is worst, it hands over the control of the journey to the client instead of leading it.

In this blog post we're going to address how to make the customer success team more proactive. We are also going to focus on specific steps one needs to take to be less reactive and why this would help customer success teams to scale.

Changes: Be proactive around product updates.

Whenever a new product or feature is launched, most customer success managers will attempt to either send out a personal email or schedule a training session with their customers to educate them about how to use the new module.

This is highly time-consuming and if you have more than a handful of customers, the approach is not scalable. In order to build your position as a trusted advisor in a scalable manner, you may want to consider collaboration with your marketing team through offering online workshops, write informational blogs, “how to” webinars, etc.

If you’re using a CS operations system, consider creating an email campaign to send out to all clients who are not using the new feature yet. Sending this email from your CS operations system will allow you to make the email look like it’s sent from you directly (versus a general email address such as customersuccess@yourcompany.com).

Getting Started: Product Updates

Record self-paced or live training (YouTube or your training system)

Announce product update using in-app messages, if possible

Launch an email campaign:

Announce the new product update to all relevant clients

Explain benefits and value

Make it easy to implement by promoting webinars/workshops to get educated about new features

Track who open the emails and who clicked through. Define a separate follow-up strategy based on findings.

Try to break it down into small measurable business objectives, such as tasks they hope to eliminate, business metrics they wish to achieve, etc. Document each objective in a success plan and track progress so you can easily demonstrate value during your executive business reviews.

Therefore, start thinking of customer success as not only the services you and your team provides, but rather as all services provided to customers with the objective of giving them the most value possible. This way your customer success team will be equipped with enough information to know when to be proactive.

Getting Started: Onboarding

Leverage your CRM system to help track your client’s initial goals (make these fields mandatory for your account executive to fill out before they mark a deal as “closed/won” or make it eligible to receive commission)

Trigger calls to action when milestones take too long to complete and follow up with clients accordingly

Trigger calls to action when milestones are completed successfully and reach out to the client via email (automatically) to celebrate

Track changes in initial goals over time (ideally in your customer success ops system, or an excel/word documents)

Create a template for a “Success Plan” which you can re-use with multiple clients.

Calculate the baseline metrics for each client and show progress in each QBR (work with a consultant to ensure you track the right metrics. A good consultant will also offer technical resources to help you automatically load the data from different systems into one centralized place to make this process efficient).

The main goal of being productive is to allow you and your team to have time to be more proactive and strategic with your customers. This would require automating a few things along the way.

To uncover opportunities to promote proactiveness in a scalable way, I recommend you review each customer success process and milestone, write down what is the manual effort related to each, and what could you write down as a repeatable task by task process, document or template.

Think: Is there anything you could have automated if you had the right systems in place. How much time would you save if you could automate these processes? Would an investment in such solution be beneficial?

I would love to hear from you: What specific tools and initiatives have helped your customer success team scale? Please answer in the comments below.

Key takeaways

Build your reputation as a customer success advisor to your clients by offering things like workshops, webinars and blogs

Know your customer’s usage patterns and leverage a consultant to help you consolidate the data automatically in one database

Set clear and measurable business goals with your customers already at the onboarding stage and use success plans to keep updating them on an ongoing basis

Be proactive about product issues and don’t be shy about using automation tools to increase adoption and perceived value

About the Author

Irit Eizips is a Customer Success evangelist and CEO for CSM Practice, passionate about customer success (and that of yours). I share this comparison to help you gain a better understanding of customer success trends as they relate to scaling your Customer Success team with tech-touch. CSM Practice can provide hands-on management consulting to help you design and implement a customer success program that best fits your unique business model. In addition, our technical consulting team can help you scale your team by automating existing customer success processes and introduce optimization, efficiencies and improve transparency. It just takes a second to follow me on Twitter (@iriteizips ) and keep track of customer success events, blogs and trends. If you have a question about this blog, send me an email to info@csmpractice.com.